colloquium at the University of Erfurt and various seminars, from Charlottesville in Virginia to Dunedin in New Zealand, were a great source of inspiration. Through a William Evans Fellowship in the spring of 2017, the University of Otago enabled me to carry out research at its School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences, which in turn allowed me to discuss the project intensively and advance it greatly. My thanks go to Doug Booth for his tremendous support, his wonderful hospitality, and his input at various workshops and over numerous coffees. My thanks also go to Stefanie Büttner, Katharina Dahl, Paula Dahl, Tristan Dohnt, Norbert Finzsch, Laura-Elena Keck, Tae-Jun Kim, Olaf von dem Knesebeck, Nina Mackert, Irene Martschukat, Maren Möhring, Stefan Offermann, Tanja Robnik, Olaf Stieglitz, Heiko Stoff, Paula-Irene Villa and Simon Wendt, who read various parts and versions of the text and discussed them with me. Paula Dahl, Nina Mackert and Irene Martschukat even worked their way through the entire manuscript; Maria Matthes and Viviann Wilmot assisted me with the research and the final editing, and Alex Skinner created an elegant translation. Without your help this project would have gotten nowhere.
Last but not least, my special thanks to Alex, Andy, Bille, Dirk, Flo, Harry, Jörg, Matthias, Paddy, Reemt, Sebastian, Silke and all the other boys and girls from Team Altona for their company across thousands of kilometers in and around Hamburg and throughout Europe.
INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF FITNESS
We live in the age of fitness. Tens of thousands of people run marathons and compete in all-comers cycle races, while millions go for an evening jog in the park or work out in gyms, where they lift weights and use machines of various kinds or practice yoga; active vacations of all kinds are more popular than ever. In 1970, this was barely conceivable. Hiking vacations were for retirees and windsurfing had just been invented. The Berlin Marathon still lay in the future. Few adults had a bicycle, while gyms were few and far between. Since then, however, fitness has boomed. Let’s consider the scale of the fitness market. In Germany alone, active people (and those who want to appear active, or at least aspire to be active) spent over 50 billion euros on fitness-related items in 2015: running shoes and sportswear, weights and carbon fiber bicycles, energy drinks and diet foods. Equally popular are fitness classes and activity vacations, fitness magazines and books, apps and gadgets. Fitness stars such as Kayla Itsines – to mention one of many examples – have millions of followers on Instagram; images of toned bodies are hugely popular on social media.1
What those engaged in “getting fit” generally have in common is that they are active, but rarely organize themselves in clubs or associations. They do not participate in a specific league, and they are almost never out to win a competition. Yet they all want to improve themselves somehow. They do not engage in the kind of organized competitive sport that spread from the United Kingdom to other modernizing societies from the mid-nineteenth century.2 Those who undertake fitness training are not looking to win a medal. Instead, what this practice aims to achieve is a fit body. This body, in turn, stands for an array of partially overlapping forces, abilities and ideals, which point far beyond the doing of sport. These encompass one’s health and performance in everyday life and at work, productivity and the ability to cope with challenging situations, potency, a slim figure and a pleasing appearance according to the prevalent standards of beauty. Also important in this context is “doing the right thing,” “doing something good” for oneself, and getting the “best” out of oneself, as well as gaining recognition for it. At times, the sheer joy of movement and activity also comes into play. These various driving forces are not mutually exclusive.
The pursuit of fitness3 is part of a culture and society that concurrently laments increasingly fat bodies. In the twenty-first century, fatness is even referred to as an epidemic, and health problems such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are a perennial topic of concern. Particularly in Western societies, but now also worldwide, the consistent message is that the lack of physical activity has assumed “frightening proportions.”4 A so-called sedentary lifestyle and an unhealthy, high-calorie diet are viewed as the main causes of increasing fatness. On the one hand, then, there is a culture of fitness, while on the other there is anxiety over the lack of exercise and burgeoning fatness. What may seem contradictory at first sight turns out to be part of a single social formation, centered on the self-responsible, committed and productive individual. Both sides of this coin (the culture of fitness and the fear of fat) revolve around the successful self, which proves its success by mastering its own body. In (post)modern societies, lack of fitness amounts to a flashing red light.
To gain a deep understanding of our age of fitness, this book delves into history. To illuminate the present through the past means comprehending history as a space “in which the present has been formed.”5 We have to draw on history if we aspire to grasp our own present, identify its problems and paradigms, and engage critically in its most contentious debates.
This entails linking the topic of fitness with the project of the free, self-responsible individual and their history. As this book reveals, historicizing fitness demonstrates that lived self-responsibility and its consolidation as an ideal have constituted a project for more than two centuries. Writing a history of fitness also means exploring the genealogy of competition and performance, and assessing their importance to modern societies, to their organization and to the societal participation of different types of person. Another key question concerns body shape and health and the relationship between the two. Above all, though, a history of fitness is a history of the body as social history: a history of values and norms, epistemic and discursive orders, representations and figurations, technologies and bodily practices. A history of the body of this kind shows how people are placed in a particular relationship to society through their bodies and how they participate in their own emplacement.6
My observations focus on recent history, since the 1970s. The last half-century may be considered the age of fitness, and it is no accident that this coincides with the age of neoliberalism. Rather than a generalizing call to arms, here neoliberalism denotes an epoch that has modeled itself on the market, interprets every situation as a competitive struggle and enjoins people to make productive use of their freedom. Neoliberalism thus describes a certain way of thinking about society and subjects, understanding their behavior and classifying it as appropriate or inappropriate. The individual is supposed to work on themself, have life under control, get fit, ensure their own productive capacity and embody these things in the truest sense of the word. This requirement has achieved unprecedented importance under neoliberalism.7 Fitness is everywhere. Fitness, as philosopher Michel Foucault might have put it, is a “dispositif” or apparatus – an era-defining network of discourses and practices, institutions and things, buildings and infrastructure, administrative measures, political programs, and much more besides.8
But I also reach further back into history in order to understand our age of fitness. At times the tracks we need to follow extend back to the eighteenth century, for example when it comes to the idea of liberty and self-determination, or the disciplining of the soldierly body. Yet it was not just the soldier but also the new republican citizen that was required to be disciplined and upright, rather than glutted, degenerate, and physically torpid like the nobility, or stooped and battered like the third estate.9 In a history of fitness, the middle of the nineteenth century also demands our attention. This is the period when Darwinism, the “survival of the fittest,” and the conception of inevitable, natural competition took the stage. And it was in the decades around 1900 that modern societies first experienced a fitness hype. At the same time, they were plagued by a crisis that was experienced, in part, as a crisis of the body. When it comes to the history of fitness over the last few decades, in many ways the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries presaged future trends more than the cult of the body in fascism and Nazism. Historians have often highlighted the 1950s and 1960s in this regard as well. After years of crisis and war, many people on both sides of the Atlantic once again indulged in the pleasures of consumption. Yet this immediately led to anxieties about its harmful effects on the body, health and performance.
The
